Straight Life - Art Pepper [197]
Diane was the only person in the history of the Nalline program that was on five hundred grains of morphine a week and passing her test! Hahahaha! We used to joke about that, too. She had to keep going down for her Nalline test because of the red tape. They knew she was on morphine.
I wasn't nice to Diane. And I know why now. I tried to avoid her because it was just breaking my heart watching her die. Can you imagine loving someone so much that you don't want to see-them?-Being so selfish?
Well, Jeff finally ... I couldn't let this go on. Mike was out on his own, working, had his own apartment. Diane goes to him, says, "I want to move in." And he comes to me, "Should I take care of her?" I said no because I could already see what she had done to him coming back into his life. He felt terrible about not letting her move in.
My mother and she got an apartment together. It was my mother's biggest thrill to be able to take care of Diane. My mother had lived her own life, and I never had loved her because she wasn't a good mother. She wasn't the kind of mother I wanted. She was a lesbian and a drunk, and I was always ashamed of her. So was Diane, but Diane wanted love so much, she found her more acceptable than I did. My mother waited on her hand and foot until her dying day. Diane was down to sixty pounds when she died. She looked like something out of Hitler's ovens. Just bones. She had just turned forty when she died.
After Diane, my mother had nothing left to live for. She died. Then our father died. And then-Bijou had had cancer a couple of times, breast cancer, and we had taken her down to Dr. Salk in Palm Springs, who's the best vet in the United States (he's the brother of Jonas Salk)-when Bijou died, it just shattered me. It was horrible to lose Diane and my mother and father, but Bijou, who had spent almost every night of her life with her face next to mine! I wanted to die.
Weirdest thing of all. About a week, two weeks before Diane died, my mother called and said, "Please come over and get us and get her out of the house. Things are really bad." I didn't want to. I didn't want to see her, but I felt guilty enough to do it. I drove down to their place in the valley, brought them over here, and Jack went down to Ah Fong's and got a great big mess of Chinese food and a big bag of fortune cookies, and I put 'em in a bowl. At random. Just dumped them in a bowl. We all took our cookie out and opened it. There must have been fifteen or twenty fortune cookies. The one Diane picked had no fortune in it. That has never happened to me in my life, and I've been eating in Chinese restaurants since I was a baby. We started giggling and Diane said, "Well, of course I have no fortune. I have no life."
I HAD a hotel room a few blocks from Christine in Hollywood, and I kept that. I had a good parole officer for a change. In fact, they changed the whole idea of the parole department. Instead of going out of their way to send their charges back to prison, parole officers were going out of their way to keep them out. Of course, at this time I didn't trust him much, but the guy was good. His name was Mr. Dom. I found out that he had played clarinet as a kid and had heard of me. He liked the way I played so he was for me right away.
Mr. Dom would send me a card telling me when to test, which was once a week every week: I was on the Nalline program. Again. Five years on Nalline and five years on parole. I'd be put in prison for violating my parole, and each time I got out parole was set at five years. Some guys never get off parole because they continue to violate and go back. That's where they have you. Mr. Dom would send a message that he was going to come and see me on such-and-such a day, so on that day I would get up early, go to the hotel room I was renting, mess the bed up and try to make it look as if it was lived in. He'd come. We'd talk. He'd ask me how I was doing.
Christine had been a singer working little gigs,